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Sir Keir Starmer is to tighten up UK rules on declaring ministerial “freebies” after a Labour MP quit the party denouncing the prime minister’s acceptance of free gifts and his “cruel” decision to cut winter fuel payments.
Rosie Duffield, MP for Canterbury, said she was “ashamed” to be a Labour MP and that Starmer’s acceptance of £32,000 of free clothing from Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli.
She claimed that to take such gifts while leader of the opposition before swiftly cutting fuel allowances for relatively poor pensioners when he entered Number 10 represented “mass hypocrisy”.
Duffield’s resignation, less than three months after the general election on July 4, was a blow to Starmer and prompted the prime minister to authorise new measures to improve “transparency” in politics.
On Sunday, cabinet office minister Pat McFadden tried to move the debate on. He said that in future ministers would have to declare hospitality they had received and its monetary value — even if it was in relation to their official duties — in the same way as a shadow minister or opposition MP.
McFadden told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg show that former prime minister David Cameron had introduced a “Tory loophole” so that shadow ministers had to be more transparent about their receipt of hospitality than those serving in government.
“We will make sure ministers and shadow ministers are treated the same going forward,” he said. Currently, ministers receiving hospitality related to their job are not obliged to record the event or its value on their register of MPs’ interests, but the event is usually released by their department in transparency data.
Penny Mordaunt, former Tory minister, said that she and other ministerial colleagues did release details on a regular basis on the hospitality they had received.
McFadden’s announcement was billed by Labour officials as evidence that Starmer wanted to “restore trust in politics”. One said: “Labour will be open and transparent, unlike the last government.”
But it was seen by the Conservatives as an attempt by Starmer to get back on to the front foot after widespread criticism of his acceptance of free clothes and football tickets at a time when he is warning of “painful” Budget decisions next month.
Duffield who was elected in 2017, has long been at odds with Starmer’s leadership, particularly on issues of sex and gender and McFadden said he was disappointed but “not surprised” she had quit.
On Saturday evening, Duffield published a letter accusing the Labour prime minister of “staggering and increasingly outrageous” hypocrisy.
“The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale. I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once-proud party,” Duffield wrote.
Rachel Reeves, chancellor, is planning to restrict the allowance to old people receiving pension credit in order to save about £1.4bn for the exchequer as part of her efforts to improve the nation’s finances.
But the move has been widely criticised by charities, trade unions and some Labour backbench MPs. Delegates at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool this week backed a motion calling for it to be reversed.
Duffield said she hoped one day to return to the Labour party, which had always been her natural political home as a single mother, union member and former teaching assistant in receipt of tax credits.
On Sunday she claimed Starmer had “a woman problem”, claiming that Downing Street was run by a male clique. “It’s clear the lads are in charge,” she said, passing over the fact that the Number 10 chief of staff is Sue Gray.
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